ELLEN McWILLIAMS
Beyond the Pale Books
€18.99
ISBN 9781914318245
REVIEWED BY Barry Keane
Barry Keane is the author of Massacre in West Cork (Mercier Press, 2014).
A sense of place excites the Irish imagination. Living awkwardly between the Irish and English worlds, Ellen McWilliams lectures in English literature in Exeter. Her husband was studying the great English republican hero Oliver Cromwell when they met. Cromwell, who stayed in Bandon on a number of occasions in 1649–50, looms large in this book, as does another great republican hero, Terence James McSwiney. Drawing from literature, politics, history and family lore, Resting places is a complex memoir of her West Cork home. Its themes echo Professor W.J. Smyth’s suggestion that West Cork is not only a place but also a personality. The Irish understand this.
McWilliams stumbled across the West Cork (Dunmanway) massacre in the journal Éire-Ireland in 2014. She was horrified. Could her tolerant and welcoming West Cork be the same place? The historian’s dry prose can never hope to speak to that horror. McWilliams has no such constraints. She grew up in a house in Knockmacool, Desertserges, Enniskeane, Co. Cork, but knew nothing of the intimate and brutal incidents that occurred there during the Irish War of Independence. On 1 February 1921 Thomas Bradfield was taken from his home and marched three miles to Castlederry, where he was shot by members of the 3rd West Cork Brigade. He had divulged information to what he thought was the British Auxiliary police, but he was in fact talking to the head of the 3rd Cork IRA Brigade flying column, Tom Barry. Bradfield’s near neighbour, Tim Coffey, had driven Barry to Bradfield’s house. Two weeks later, on St Valentine’s Day, Tim and his brother Jim were taken from their beds by members of a police squad called the ‘Anti-Sinn Fein Society’ and shot dead. A sign left on one of the bodies linked their killing to that of Bradfield. The West Cork IRA became convinced that local Protestants had guided the squad to the Coffeys’ home. Less than a month later in Timoleague, Bradfield’s brother-in-law, John Good, went for a smoke and was shot at his back door. He bled to death in his wife’s arms. The terrified local doctor refused to come to his assistance. This cascade of slaughter did not end there. Sixteen days later John’s son, William, was dragged off his pony and trap and had his skull smashed in with a rock while returning from Bandon. William had come down from Dublin to settle his father’s affairs. A year later (April 1922) thirteen Protestant men were shot dead at their homes by the anti-treaty IRA in the West Cork massacre. The understanding of this latter incident remains a bitterly contested topic among Irish historians and McWilliams carefully avoids both this horror (which she finds profoundly troubling) and the controversy. Instead, she focuses on her Cumann na mBan great-grandmother’s reaction to the massacre:
‘What did Ellen say when she heard the news? When death on his white horse came galloping across green fields on 29 April 1922? When she stepped out into the morning to find pandemonium and unimaginable grief rising across the valley?’ (p. 152).
The core questions that McWilliams asks are startling in their simplicity:
‘[H]ow do you atone for a massacre? how do you forgive a massacre? how long does it take to write about a massacre? I have only one answer and no other answers. It takes a year—and it takes a hundred years’ (p. 160).
The structure of the book is unusual. It is a series of meditations about life, motherhood and families, building a narrative towards a contemplation of the 1921–2 events. Over-used to the rigid formalities of historical writing, I found this structure difficult initially but perseverance pays dividends. McWilliams’s exploration of the 1922 murders is wrapped inside her own story of the birth of her child, the Vagina Monologues, her education in rural Ireland and her life in English academia.
Here she breaks new ground. There is a decolonisation ‘war’ inside the academy (p. 8). This opens significant research opportunities for Irish historians. It is a welcome development. Irish history does not excite the English, despite Ireland’s being their first colony. English schools teach about the empire in India and Africa but not in Ireland. This myopia has a darker sibling. McWilliams, like many others, has experienced less-than-pleasant attitudes towards the occupants of the ‘land of saints and scholars’. That it grates with her is beyond question. Brought up to be conscious of the small differences, she is aware of the power of the word to wound. Most Irish are. But what troubles her most is her failure to respond. Shock alone often robs us of a response. What is the correct response to a ‘glib salvo’ that ‘Edmund Spenser loved Ireland, he just didn’t like the people who lived there’, or to ‘the unapologetic laughter that followed’ (p. 7)?
In April 2022 the Irish Times published a McWilliams meditation called ‘Dunmanway Fields’ on the 1922 murders in West Cork. This book grew out of that. McWilliams will understand more than most when I say that its gestation has been worth the wait. A fluid and crisp writer, she has many stories yet to tell. I look forward to reading them.